Episode 5 Rip Off Britain

We asked you to tell us what's left you feeling totally ripped off,

and you've contacted us in your thousands.

You've told us about the companies that you think get it wrong

and the customer service that simply is not up to scratch.

If you're paying for a good service,

you expect a good service and a good product, whatever it may be.

At the end of the day, we expect value for money.

You've asked us to track down the scammers who stole your money

and investigate the extra charges you'd say are unfair.

The wool's been pulled over our eyes,

I don't think we get a fair price.

I think they should always put the customer first.

And when you've lost out but no-one else is to blame,

you've come to us to stop others falling into the same trap.

And no-one could sort that out for you over ten years? No-one has.

So, whether it's a blatant rip-off or a genuine mistake, we're here

to find out why you're out of pocket and what you can do about it.

Your stories, your money. This is Rip-Off Britain.

Hello and thanks for joining us once again

as we get our teeth into quite a mix of really shocking stories today

that involve all those serious problems with everyday things,

like phones, bills...

All the issues that affect pretty much every one of us,

but which, when something goes wrong,

can have a really frustrating and soul-destroying impact on our lives.

And that's certainly true

with one of the cases we'll be investigating today.

Imagine discovering you've been overcharged for something

and not just for a few months or even a year, but for decades.

You'd definitely want some of your money back, wouldn't you?

But as we unravel not just that particular story,

but other cases where people

have been left feeling totally frustrated with the charges

or problems they've been saddled with,

we'll have unmissable tips

to make sure that you don't find yourself in the same boat.

Coming up, the homeowners who, without knowing it,

have been pouring money down the drain for the last three decades.

Could YOU be doing the same?

Since at least the 1980s, we've been paying Severn Trent ?60-?70 a year.

And this is for a service that we are not receiving.

And why unexpected charges on one of Britain's bestselling phones

left this family with not-so-smiley faces.

It was like ?100 and I was like, "Jade, what have you done?"

Well, I don't know about you,

but whenever I've bought a new appliance -

let's say a washing machine or a fridge -

and I'm almost afraid to confess this,

I often put all the paperwork to the one side

and don't bother filling in the form asking me to register my product.

But it turns out that could be a pretty serious mistake.

When you buy a new electrical appliance,

the chances are you too put to one side the forms

to register your purchase with the manufacturer.

But that paperwork can be far more important than it looks,

as Lorraine Ward from Tamworth knows all too well.

Rewind to October 2012,

and following the birth of Lorraine's second daughter, Lacey,

she decided to treat herself to a brand-new tumble dryer

to help with washing all those baby clothes.

She came across one by the well-known brand Beko,

who, over the last 25 years,

have sold more than 20 million appliances in the UK.

I'd heard of them before,

but we'd never had any of their products before.

But everything seemed to get really good feedback on various websites,

so I felt trusting enough to buy it.

Once the tumble dryer arrived,

Lorraine is quite sure that, as she normally would,

she DID register her purchase with the manufacturer.

I've always registered products before.

The actual paperwork to sell it was just like a little card,

and it was just a case of just fill your details on the back.

You could do it online, but at the time it was easier for me

to stick it in the post.

After she thought she put the form into the post,

Lorraine forgot about it and settled into the luxury

of having the new tumble dryer.

The amount of clothes babies go through!

To actually get them washed and then be able to put them

straight into a tumble dryer and back in a drawer

within a matter of hours was just fantastic.

It made our lives so much easier.

But after barely two and a half months' use,

Lorraine's dream appliance turned into a nightmare.

Her husband was using the dryer one Sunday morning

when there was a sudden and dramatic problem.

Initially, the electric went off,

and then he could start smelling sort of burning.

As Lorraine's husband entered the utility room,

he was shocked to see flames shooting out of the tumble dryer

into the rest of the room and straight through into the kitchen.

He was screaming for me to wake up, and he was passing me the baby

and trying to get the car seat and my car keys, saying,

"Get out, get out, the house is on fire".

The family scrambled to get out,

as the fire tore through the utility room and kitchen,

and waited for the fire brigade to arrive.

When they came, they all sort of jumped out of their van

and started getting the hoses and everything ready,

and my husband said to them, "It's the tumble dryer.

"There's two-foot flames coming out of it."

The fire completely destroyed the utility room and kitchen,

and the rest of the house had been filled with smoke

that damaged most of the family's belongings.

Going in after, it just looked like something out of a horror movie,

with completely black walls, ceilings...

It was really horrible to see after.

Lorraine had no idea that shortly after she'd bought her dryer,

that particular model had been recalled

due to concerns over product safety.

While she remains convinced that she HAD sent off the form to register

her product with the manufacturer,

she hadn't received any recall notice,

as should normally happen if the company had received her details.

And although a recall notice was published in the national press,

Lorraine hadn't seen it, so she simply hadn't known

that the dryer was potentially dangerous

and should have been returned.

We believe it had been recalled

only a few weeks after we purchased it,

but we knew absolutely nothing about it at all.

The impact of the fire was huge.

With no home insurance for their rented property,

they were left with nowhere to live.

But family and friends rallied round to help.

People were brilliant. They were bringing us bags of clothes.

Someone brought us a Moses basket for the baby!

Sorry...

TEARFULLY: People were bringing bottles, everything,

cos we'd lost everything.

After two weeks, the manufacturers, Beko,

paid for the family's temporary accommodation.

The company has since paid out around ?20,000

to cover the uninsured house contents,

plus a further sum for stress and inconvenience.

But for Lorraine, none of that

lessens the impact all of this has had on the family.

I don't think any amount of money, really, would...replace the fear.

You know, it doesn't pay for that, it doesn't pay for the effects

that you're left with after the event.

Lorraine says her nine-year-old daughter was particularly affected

by what happened.

Anything that sounded like an alarm or an unusual noise after that,

she would panic, she would freeze on the spot.

I'd always have to explain a new noise

because it would genuinely frighten her.

When we contacted Beko, the company told us

it deeply regrets any incident caused by its appliances,

all of which meet or exceed UK and European standards

and that its highest priority is the safety of customers.

It sincerely apologised to Lorraine,

saying what happened was down to a third-party component

used in a small batch of dryers made between May and October 2012.

Beko explained that when it became aware of the issue,

it launched swift action, including taking out newspaper adverts

and contacting customers who had registered their appliance.

But it said it had no record of Lorraine registering hers.

The company stress that no products currently on the market

are affected,

advising that information on product recalls is available on its website.

It also pointed out that

while many manufacturers have launched product recalls

in recent years, in this case,

it traced almost 90% of affected dryers,

significantly better than the industry average of just 10% to 20%.

But since Lorraine's case,

millions of tumble dryers made by other manufacturers

have been the subject of similar safety notices

because of a risk that they too could catch fire.

If one of the affected models is in YOUR home,

that's something that you really do want to know about.

But campaign group Electrical Safety First

believes suppliers are not doing enough

to get the message through.

The current recall system in the UK is failing consumers.

Typically, when a manufacturer needs to recall a product,

they often get about 10% to 20% of those products back,

which means there are hundreds of thousands of those affected products

still in people's homes.

But there are ways to quickly and easily check

which major safety recalls might apply to you.

Electrical Safety First has put on its website

a very handy database of every electrical product

that's been recalled, back to 2007.

All you have to do is type in a product name or details

and it will instantly tell you if it's one that has been recalled.

We, as consumers, all have a responsibility to take action

amongst ourselves, which is why we've got a recall checker,

where people can go to our website

and simply put a few details in to see if any of the products

that they have in their home are subject to a recall

and then that will also tell them what they need to do about that.

We're also encouraging consumers to register their appliance

at the My Appliance website that the manufacturers have set up.

And now, following concerns that the whole recall system is ineffective,

the Retail Ombudsman has launched a scheme,

which will register contact details at the point of sale

when customers buy new appliances.

So, hopefully, if a fault is discovered,

you will be told about it

and experiences like Lorraine's won't happen again.

It's frightening, you don't buy these things ever expecting

something like this to happen, and nobody should expect it to happen,

but, unfortunately, I guess in the rarer cases, it does.

It is really, really scary.

Now, until recently, we'd probably have said

that it was the energy companies that had the most complicated bills,

but with the regulator, Ofgem, now telling them

to make their costs easier to understand,

perhaps the rather dubious honour of having the most complex bills

and impenetrable charges should pass to the providers

of yet another essential utility.

And, in the first instance, that would have to be water.

Now, if you've never really taken a close look at your water bill,

well, it may be a very good idea to do it now

because here's a story about a charge

that was made by a water company which, in this case,

turned out to be totally unnecessary.

This is the village of Crick in Northamptonshire.

It's a close community, where everyone looks out for one another.

Hi, Jean! Hi, Jean! All right?

When there's news, it travels fast

and currently, there is one topic of conversation on everyone's lips.

Do you think we shall hear any more about the water?

Speaking to the Daventry councillor...

Yeah. ..she seemed a bit optimistic about it.

The problem started back in the autumn of 2014

when rumours began that some residents may well have been

paying unnecessarily for part of their water bill.

It wasn't long before the whole village

took an interest in the discussion.

There should be a liaison

between the council and the water authorities, really.

Well, I would have thought so, yeah,

because we're exhausting all our outlets, really, aren't we?

We do seem to be, yes.

Jean Garner has lived in her home for 48 years

and keeps a close eye on her finances.

The hydrangeas have come on this week, haven't they?

They have, yeah.

I am quite meticulous with bills.

I check them, I check bank statements

and I suppose it arises from the days when you had a young family

and money was tight, and it's something that I've always done

to make sure that all bills and accounts are correct.

So Jean was surprised to learn from one of her neighbours

that, for 30 years, she may have been wrongly billed

by her provider Severn Trent Water

for a service that she isn't getting.

In this village, we pay two lots of water bill -

we pay Anglia Water for the water supply

and we pay Severn Trent for wastage,

and the new neighbours that we were in conversation with

said that they didn't pay Severn Trent.

So when we looked into it further,

we found out that the bill for Severn Trent

was for stormwater collection.

Jean, along with 14 other residents on the estate,

was paying around ?60 a year for this stormwater collection,

which is a charge levied by water companies

when their drains filter the rainwater into the sewers.

But what worried Jean after she'd made further inquiries

was that some of her neighbours weren't paying this charge at all,

so she wanted to know why SHE was.

The neighbours told me, "We don't pay Severn Trent any charges.

"Our stormwater goes into a soakaway."

So my neighbour and I,

we got together and discussed this

and decided that we shouldn't probably be paying, either.

So Jean contacted Severn Trent Water and asked them to investigate.

And an engineer came out and tested the water

and found that it didn't go into the sewer, it went into a soakaway

and he said, "You shouldn't be paying any bills to Severn Trent."

The engineer discovered that when Jean's house was built in the 1960s,

it had what's called a soakaway installed,

which means rainwater soaks back into the garden.

It also means that the water companies

don't deal with the rainwater,

so don't need to charge for it,

which in turn means that Jean had been paying Severn Trent Water

unnecessarily for the last 30 years.

Since at least the 1980s, we've been paying Severn Trent ?60-?70 a year.

And this is for a service that we are not receiving.

Severn Trent Water explained to us

that when the water industry was privatised,

the local authority in Jean's area

hadn't passed over any sewer records.

So it simply hadn't known which houses had a soakaway system.

The water company says it relies on customers themselves

to pass on this information - a fact which, it points out,

is included on its water bills.

But even so, once the company DID know

it had been overcharging Jean for three decades,

she was horrified by their initial response.

They told us that they were only going to refund us six months,

then they sent us a cheque for ?31 something.

We felt really aggrieved.

Severn Trent Water said the rebate was in line

with guidance from the regulator Ofwat,

who recommend that, as a minimum,

rebates should go back to the start of the current year.

But Jean and her neighbours were so frustrated by the situation,

they contacted other households on the estate,

to break it to them that they too could well be paying

for rainwater drainage when they simply didn't have to.

And very soon, there were plenty of people with a story to tell.

It's ?60 a year, isn't it,

the payment for the removal of surface water?

What baffled the residents was the difference in the size

of the refunds that Severn Trent Water was offering.

They gave me a partial refund. 20-odd quid, I got back.

Oh, I got more than you! It's not the amount, it's the principle.

They've been charging us for a service that they have not provided.

Well, after we got involved in this situation,

there was some very good news indeed.

Severn Trent Water have now agreed to backdate these refunds

for many of the Crick residents to 2003,

netting Jean a payment of more than ?500.

And what's more, Ofwat have told us

that all ten sewage companies in England and Wales

have now agreed to backdate refund payments

beyond the current financial year.

So, it's well worth checking your water bills

to see if you too have been charged for services you simply don't use.

Once again, we've opened up our Rip-Off Britain pop-up shop.

This time it was in Nottingham,

where our top team of experts was on hand to help with

as many of your consumer problems as they possibly could.

And students Josh Bore, Tom Giles and Lee Smith

came to see legal expert Gary Rycroft about the problems

they'd had with their rented accommodation.

Our oven broke, our microwave broke, our fridge-freezer's broken,

we had mould in the ceilings and on the walls, we needed extractor fans.

I had loads of mould in my bathroom and they just painted over it.

They did install an extractor fan eventually

but the mess they left... It's just not really good enough,

the solution they've provided, really.

We've got pigeons living in the lounge.

It doesn't sound much fun, does it? What could you recommend?

What I do want to find out more about is this issue

with the pigeons and the mould.

There's a potential health issue there, I think.

In terms of the kitchen mould, we had a lot over our ceiling

that caused the ceiling roof to actually leak.

The mould has leaked through the cupboards

and it's caused them to sag.

When we contacted them about the cupboards falling off the walls,

she said it was because we've got too many tins in the cupboards.

If you think the property's not safe to live in, you can ask

the local authority to come and look at the property

and just do an assessment of what's needed to bring it up to scratch.

And that kind of thing will put pressure on the landlord.

They have a legal duty to carry out any works of repair

and maintenance that the local authority insist upon.

Have you got deposits with her?

It's about ?300. ?300, yes.

Between you? ALL: Each.

There's quite a lot of money at stake.

The tenancy deposit situation is interesting

because if she hasn't put it in an authorised

tenancy deposit scheme, then she isn't entitled to sue you

for unpaid rent.

So you do need to find out what the situation is with the deposits

because she could have shot herself in the foot by not

following the correct procedure there.

It means you could put some pressure on your landlord to get

all of this sorted out. Do let us know how it's all worked out.

We will, thank you. Thank you.

Well, thanks for coming in and good luck.

After filming, the boys acted on Gary's advice and asked

their landlord for information regarding the deposit scheme.

Since their enquiry, they've all received their deposit back in full

and have moved out of the property to somewhere

they're much happier in.

61% of us in the UK own one of these - a smartphone.

Choosing one of them

and getting yourself on the right tariff can seem pretty complicated.

The people in our next story settled on a Samsung S4 but little did

they know that a key setting on the handset would leave them

with sky-high bills and worse still, both the manufacturer

and the phone provider knew that the problem existed.

We're often told that it's good to talk, but many of us

prefer the convenience of sending a simple text message.

In 2015, in the UK, we sent a staggering 101 billion of them.

But some of the people texting on one of the world's most popular

smartphones have found that those messages have ended up costing

a lot more than they'd bargained for, thanks to the addition

of a little extra touch to show how they're feeling.

Samsung has sold more than 200 million of its Galaxy S phones

since their launch in 2010 and the Galaxy S4 alone sold more

than 10 million units in its first month of sale.

One proud owner is 20-year-old Jade Cochrane.

She switched to a Galaxy S4 when her old mobile phone contract came

to an end and she decided she wanted something, well, a bit smarter.

My phone battery was draining out,

so I didn't want to be paying money for a phone

that wasn't working right,

so I thought it was due for an upgrade.

All my friends were, like,

showing me what they can do on their phones and stuff.

I was like, "I want to do that."

Jade took out a two-year contract with the provider EE.

She got her dream phone, 600 minutes of calls

and unlimited texts, all for ?30.99 a month.

Every time I go to get a mobile,

I always make sure I get unlimited texts because I text all the time.

Luckily for Jade, it's her mum Paula who pays for the phone each month

from her own bank account.

I've always been quite happy to pay her bill.

She's never abused the fact that I pay for it and I pay direct debit.

She's usually very careful.

So, it came as a nasty surprise in November 2014

when Paula received a bill from EE for ?100.92.

And I was like that. "Jade! What've you done?

"You must've went over your minutes because it's unlimited texts,

"so it couldn't have been your texting."

Baffled as to why the bill was so high,

Paula called EE for an explanation.

And she was horrified to be told that the next month's bill

in December was going to be an even bigger one -

a whopping ?448.97.

I was really shocked because I thought, no way,

for a mobile phone bill? That is absolutely ridiculous.

EE told Paula that the reason the bills were so high was because

of the number of picture messages being sent from Jade's phone.

But Jade didn't think she was sending any.

I already knew if you sent a picture it did cost money

so that's why I didn't intend to do that,

I never sent a picture through a text.

Paula couldn't understand what was going on.

How could Jade keep on running up such vast bills

when she swore blind she wasn't sending any pictures?

Well, it turned out she was.

These little things.

Emoticons.

And although Jade didn't realise it,

on the Galaxy S4, they came at a price.

An emoticon is a little smiley face, or unhappy face.

We use them in text speak, we use them in instant messaging,

even in e-mails these days.

And because we use them all over the place

we just assume that they're going to be free to send.

But the problem is when handsets have been turning these emoticons

into pictures,

these picture messages aren't included in people's bundles.

They can cost up to 40 pence per message to send,

and that's the problem that many people have been experiencing.

Other handset manufacturers have been implicated, too,

but Samsung seems to be the main handset

that people are having issues with.

And of course it was a Samsung phone behind Jade's bills.

So every time she sent an emoticon,

Jade's mobile company would charge her 40 pence per message

because the phone's default setting

was to translate these text messages into picture messages.

Now, Jade and Paula had no idea that these emoticons came at a cost,

and by the time they found out,

the Cochrans had already been charged ?943.

Paula rang EE again to protest,

and the company offered her ?100 back as a goodwill gesture,

but Paula refused

because she wanted to get all the extra charges back.

I says, "Well, I'm not accepting ?100," I says,

"because that is a ridiculous," I says,

"amount of money for a mobile phone bill."

I know that my mum's obviously hurting by the fact

that all this money's gone

and it brought the whole family down, to be honest.

ENGINE TURNS OVER

The one piece of good news

was that when Paula went to visit her local EE store,

staff reset the phone so that sending emoticons would

no longer show up as picture messages,

and therefore preventing Jade from

racking up more of those extra charges.

It was a surprisingly simple fix,

and one that plenty of other Galaxy S4 owners

may wish they'd known about too,

because if they'd sent an emoticon on any of these phones

manufactured before April 2014,

they'd most likely have been charged

in exactly the same way as Jade and Paula.

To stop that,

all that was needed to be done was to go into the phone settings,

then click on Input mode,

and then finally select the Unicode option.

But for Jade and Paula, that solution came too late,

and although the problem was now solved,

because bills are backdated, by the end of the month,

one final huge bill - this time for over ?253 -

hit the doormat.

It shouldn't be allowed,

and I feel quite...

I feel as though I've been robbed of my money.

But when we contacted EE,

the company pointed out that Paula's monthly itemised bills

DID highlight the extra charges, making it clear

they were messages not included in her mobile phone plan.

EE also told us they'd sent a series of text messages to the phone

warning the phone usage was higher than usual,

which could result in higher than normal charges,

and they stressed it's the handset, not mobile networks like them,

which converts emoticons into picture messages.

So they're working with the phone manufacturer Samsung

to ensure this won't happen automatically in the future.

And it seems that's been successful,

because while Samsung reiterated that only phones

made before April 2014 had been affected by this,

it also told us that this issue has been fully resolved

and that now all Samsung smartphones classify emoticons as SMS messages.

But Jade and Paula remain frustrated

that they've had to stump up nearly ?1,200

that, if the phone had been set up differently,

they would never have had to pay,

so they hope their story will serve as a cautionary tale,

to prevent others being caught out by phone charges they didn't expect.

Read up on your technology.

If you're going to buy a device, nowadays,

the technology is getting so advanced,

make sure you do research on it before you buy it.

Well, you can't help sympathising with Jade and Paula

about the money they've lost,

and if you've got a different phone,

don't think you don't need to worry about unexpected extra charges.

There's a whole raft of ways that some smartphones can be...

shall we say,

a little too smart for their own good?

If you have a story that you'd like us to investigate,

then do get in touch with us via our Facebook page, BBC Rip Off Britain.

Our website is bbc.co.uk/ripoff Britain.

Or you can e-mail us at [email protected].

Or indeed if you want to send us a letter, then our address is...

It's clear that we can end up feeling short-changed,

or treated truly unfairly in every aspect of our lives,

and I must admit,

I'm really astonished by some of the stories we've heard about today.

It's actually hard to see how some of the people we heard from

could have acted any differently.

I know, it is quite extraordinary, isn't it?

And yet, they have been stuck paying the price,

when as far as they were concerned that really should not be the case.

And the problems that eventually occurred

really should have been flagged up an awful lot sooner.

But hopefully, what has happened today is you have picked up

some really useful advice in case any of the same things

ever happen to you,

and if you do find yourself losing out as a result,

then please do let us know, because maybe it's something

that we can look into on one of our upcoming programmes.

And we have plenty of those coming up over the next few months.

In fact, I'm happy to say our food and holiday series

will be returning,

so let us know if there's something on those topics

that we can look into on your behalf.

But in the meantime, that's all we've got time for for today.

Thanks to everyone who shared their stories with us,

and we'll see you back here very soon to investigate some more.

Til then, from all of the team, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.